Changing Planes

The Hennebet look remarkably like me. That is to say, not only are they the same general shape and size as people on my plane, with ringers and toes and ears and all the other bits we check a baby for, but also they have pallid skin, dark hair, nearsighted eyes of mixed brown and green, and rather short, stocky figures. Their posture is terrible. The young ones are bright and agile, the old ones are thoughtful and forgetful. An unadventurous and timid people, fond of landscape and inclined to run away from strangers, they are monogamous, hardworking, slightly dyspeptic, and deeply domestic.

When I first came to their plane I felt at home at once, and—perhaps since I looked like one of them and even, in some respects, acted like one of them—the Hennebet did not show any inclination to run away from me. I stayed a week at the hostel. (The Interplanary Agency, which has existed for several kalpas, maintains hostels, inns, and luxury hotels in many popular regions, while protecting vulnerable areas from intrusion.) Then I moved to the home of a widow who supported her family by offering room and board to a few people, all of them natives but me. The widow, her two teenage children, the three other boarders, and I all ate breakfast and dinner together, and so I found myself a member of a native household. They were certainly kindly people, and Mrs. Nan-nattula was an excellent cook.

The Hennebet language is notoriously difficult, but I struggled along with it with the help of the translatomat provided by the Agency. I soon felt that I was beginning to know my hosts. They were not really distrustful; their shyness was mostly a defense of their privacy. When they saw I wasn’t invasive, they unstiffened; and I unstiffened by making myself useful. Once I convinced Mrs. Nannattula that I really wanted to help her in the kitchen, she was happy to have a chef’s apprentice. Mr. Battannele needed a listener, and I listened to him talk about politics (Hennebet is a socialist democracy run mainly by committees, not very efficiently, perhaps, but at least not disastrously). And I traded informal language lessons with Tenngo and Annup, nice adolescents. Tenngo wanted to be a biologist and her brother had a gift for languages. My translatomat was useful, but I learned most of what Hennebet I learned by teaching Annup English.

With Tenngo and Annup I seldom felt the disorientation that would come over me every now and then in conversation with the adults, a sense that I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, that there had been an abrupt, immense discontinuity in comprehension. At first I blamed it on my poor grasp of the language, but it was more than that. There were gaps. Suddenly the Hennebet were on the other side of the gap, totally out of reach. This happened particularly often when I talked with my fellow boarder, old Mrs. Tattava. We’d start out fine, chatting about the weather or the news or her embroidery stitches, and then all at once the discontinuity would occur right in the midst of a sentence. “I find leafstitch nice for filling odd-shaped areas, but it was such a job painting the whole building with little leaves, I thought we’d never finish it!”

“What building was that?” I said.

“Hali tutuve,” she said, placidly threading her needle.

I had not heard the word tutuve before. My translatomat gave it as shrine, sacred enclosure, but had nothing for hali. I went to the library and looked it up in the Encyclopedia of Hennebet. Hali, it said, had been a practice of the people of the Ebbo Peninsula in the previous millennium; also there was a folk dance called halihali.

Mrs. Tattava was standing halfway up the stairs with a rapt expression. I said good day. “Imagine the number of them!” she said.

“Of what?” I asked cautiously.

“The feet,” she said, smiling. “One after the other, one after the other. Such a dance! So long a dance!”

After several of these excursions I asked Mrs. Nannattula in a circuitous fashion if Mrs. Tattava was having a problem with her memory. Mrs. Nannattula, chopping greens for the tunum poa, laughed and said, “Oh, she’s not all there. Not at all!”

I said some conventionality—”What a pity.”

My hostess glanced at me with faint puzzlement but pursued her thought, still smiling. “She says we’re married! I love to talk with her. It’s a real honor to have so much abba in the house, don’t you think? I feel very lucky!”

I knew abba: it was a common shrub, an evergreen; we used abba berries, pungent, a bit like juniper, in certain dishes. There was an abba bush in the back yard and a little jar of the dried berries in the cupboard. But I didn’t think the house was full of them.

I brooded over Mrs. Tattava’s “hali shrine.” I knew of no shrines at all on Hennebet, except the little niche in the living room where Mrs. Nannattula always kept a few flowers or reeds or, come to think of it, a sprig of abba. I asked her if the niche had a name, and she said it was the tutuve.